I purchased this case as a gift to house a new i7 system. The case was shipped via UPS and arrived with no damage, attributed to the good job on packaging the case for shipment. The case comes with no Power Supply and two fans, a 120MM Thermaltake branded exhaust fan in the rear, and a 200MM situated at the top rear of the unit. The 120MM fan is a major disappointment, not worth the plastic used in its construction. I replaced it with an old Antec fan I had, then a Scythe S-FLEX-E. The 200MM fan at the top moves a good volume of air at a low RPM and low static pressure. I threw another S-FLEX at the top, then side mounted a third. Temps rarely exceeded 50c under load (Compared to ~60 with stock cooling), even in these hot Florida Summers. After these cooling upgrades, the performance of the case is much better.

Installation of components was as expected, no more difficult than any other PC I’ve assembled (Though not as easy as working with a full tower case with a removable tray). The absolute worst “feature” of this case is the tool-less Card Retention System. These are supposed to make installing expansion cards easier/quicker (I guess, but how often is one installing / removing expansion cards? And how much time is really saved by fiddling with an ineffective frustrating plastic retention system versus ye olde phillips head screwdriver? Yet I digress…). At any rate, this “system” consists of tabbed plastic clips that slide on a toothed platform. The idea is you can squeeze a clip down and the plastic teeth will keep it mounted. Unfortunately, this system was very poorly engineered and the teeth are not spaced appropriately for anything – they snap nicely with no card, however the thickness of an expansion card’s angle bracket disallows these clips to be used, at best barely snapping down. Further complicating matters is the plastic peg used to fit where a screw would go is not long enough. (To make matters worse, in an attempt to use what I paid for I tried to snap in the audio breakout card on my motherboard – the plastic snapped under the slightest pressure). In short, stay away from these clips at all costs. Speaking of poorly designed retention mechanisms, the 5.25/3.5 retention clips are just as bad as the clips for the expansion cards. I had no confidence on them to retain anything. To Thermaltake: Did you even attempt to use these with any consumer hardware before deciding to implement them? Please hire engineers with some chops. Thanks!

Other than these extremely poor clips, the case is decently constructed. The right panel comes off and there’s a hole in the (no removable) motherboard tray to allow for easy installation of an aftermarket cooler. However, there isn’t a lot of room in between the tray and the panel, disallowing this as a means of cable management. Another issue regarding the case is the tight confines between the 200MM fan and a motherboard. My Motherboard is pressed up against the fan housing – thankfully there were no components sticking out to clip the fan, but this could be a potential issue for other users (Motherboard used was a MSI Big Bang X-Power). Furthermore, the case utilizes a bottom mount for the PSU, so make sure your PSU cables are long enough to reach to the top of the case. Another annoyance of this case is the PSU fan filter. To clean it, you’ll have to remove the PSU – simply unacceptable. If you don’t have a modular power supply (And have a fair to large amount of connectors) this case will be very cramped, very quickly.

Last complaint, and on to the good things about this case: The side window is basically useless. It’s tiny and ineffective (Heard that before).

OK, the good stuff:

The case looks pretty slick – the mesh adds a nice feel to the tower. I happen to like the bottom mount PSU, so that worked out. The top mounted SATA dock is the pièce de résistance – hook up the internal SATA cable to an internal SATA header, hook the power up, and drop any SATA drive (2.5 or 3.5 in) into the hot swap dock. I use this on a regular basis for large file transfers instead of saturating my network. I have two external HDDs that I routinely shuffle (via BlacX Duet Caddies) between a HTPC, Gaming PC, and this PC and it makes for a very welcome addition. Considering the price of a stand alone dock (And the necessity for AC Power) this case provides an attractive alternative, especially if in the market for a new low/mid range mid tower. This…

I love this case, it has a huge fan on the top, my old case had a fan on the front and it sucked in dirt and dog hair, hopefully I will be able to keep this case cleaner. I love the Top Mounted HDD Docking Station, you can plug in a hard drive on the top for extra storage or to put your backup files or maybe your music or pictures, I find this case has so many helpful things. Being a Disabled American Veteran I find that having the USB ports at the top and not at the bottom easier to access. I am running four fans, the big fan on top is a little noisy but not any louder than any other fan. My system runs faster and cooler, I upgraded to Windows 7, and I upgraded to an AMD Phenom processor with 4GB DDR3 memory, I am very happy with this case and my new system. If you are looking for a good, reliable, and unique case give this one a try.

The Thermaltake V6 isn’t the prettiest case made, nor is it the best constructed, but man, can this keep the heat at bay. I’ve built systems since the mid-eighties, but this case seems to have the best cross flow of all of them. The top comes with a 200mm draw fan, the back comes with a 120mm draw. I installed a 120 intake on the front, and another on the side. The 200mm fan sits over the CPU (i7 2600k with a 212 cooler),and the back draw is directly in back of the chip. The CPU idles at 30degrees C, and it hit 62 degrees once when I played Crysis for a few hours. The GPUs ( 2 bridged 560s) idle at almost the same as the CPU, and have gone up as high as 65 degrees C. I do have to admit that with 2 fans per GPU, the chip cooler fan, and the four case fans, the noise reminds me of living in back of a turbo aircraft, but earphones solve that problem, and to heck with complaining neighbors.

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